So back in the day we solved the open office problem by putting walks and doors around each worker. We moved premises and took the opportunity to give everyone a (small) office with a door. About 70% of our actual floor plan was for common open space - big kitchen, diner, lounge etc. But for work you had a private space with a door.
Over 10 years later we bought another company and had their local staff over for a visit. Almost immediately a fairly loud person exclaimed "it's so quiet here!" (and not in a good way). Their office was separated into rooms of 4-5 people, so they were used to plenty of banter. Interestingly the quiet ones complained about the loud ones (but not the other way around).
We ended up with a somewhat hybrid model - we took on more space and made more open-plan areas, and small-team offices.
I'm a coder, do I like the solitude to focus. Others need more interaction. I think there's a danger in trying to propogate a one-approach-for-everyone. Different people have different needs. Creating a mix of spaces allows for mentorship at the beginning and an eventual migration to either a solitary space, or co-work space, depending on personality. This approach though never seems to get any press, it's always about the tyranny of open plan, or the soulessness of everyone being locked away in cells. (on HN its always the tyranny of Open plan :)
In my context cubicals are considered to be "open plan". We had some cubical dividers in our first office, way back in the day, but it's an interim stage at best.
Of course we had that because we didn't have space for walls. When we moved we got a lot more space, made offices, but monthly rent went up about 6 fold. It's a very real cost.
In fact, after salaries, it's our biggest cost by a long way. Given that most people are happy working from home we'll likely downscale our space a lot at our next lease renewal.
> Very few people get to actually try out the cell. Cubicles aren't offices. They're wire cages for moneys at the zoo.
Never having worked in a cubicle, I wonder: don't those dividers actually help a bit with noise? Sure, I don't expect them to be individual-office level quiet, but still better than fully open.
I used to work in a building where one "open-office" had dividers mounted on the desks, reaching about the screen height, with carpeted floors and some kind of sound absorbing panels on the ceilings. It was extremely quiet compared to the other "regular" offices that only had the carpets.
I think quiet is a proxy measure for “safe and secluded”. In every actual office I’ve been fortunate enough to have, I arranged my desk to face the door and, with the door closed, not only did I get quiet but I also got “cannot be snuck up upon”.
I think there’s a primal aspect to how deeply you are willing to block out your local environment and let your mind go deep on a problem that relates to how safe/secure that environment feels.
Noise is just the most obvious annoyance to talk about, but I don’t think it’s primarily about the noise.
Tall-walled cubicles did give you some separation. While managers (generally) had offices they were mostly for 1.) status, 2.) a bit more space, and 3.) to give them somewhere they could easily have a private conversation. The cultural expectation was doors open unless there was some specific reason not to. In practice the focus difference between offices and cubes wasn't all that great.
They don't give any respite from the noise. At most they give you a bit of privacy from people staring at your screen. And most mini-cubicles these days don't even help with keeping someone from staring at your screen from behind. It's downright creepy. I very much agree with the wire-cages for monkeys at a zoo comment.
These days everyone spends their in-office time on zoom calls with their coworkers, and no amount of blankets dividing the workspace is able to absorb the constant "You're on mute Bob" that fills the office air.
What's the rational behind coming in at that point?
When I was in an office, my team was co-located, so we rarely needed a call. Currently my team is mutually remote without an office, so we zoom our preferred environment.
A lot of people do a combination of working with people locally and having with calls with people, possibly in different groups, who are elsewhere. When I was a product manager I met with many people who were in the office and we'd typically do that in person. (At that time, anyone local came in.) But I probably also spent hours every day on the phone with field people and others who weren't in the same location.
Sometimes a bunch of us meet at the office to work together on something that needs a lot of back and forth, like a brainstorm session. And to socialize during lunch. If independent work is needed then we’re all at home.
While I agree with "People and groups are all different and there’s no one size fits all answer." in a sense, we cannot stop there. There is more searching to be done.
Let me take a slight sidebar, after which I'll reconnect to open offices. I've recently studied the philosophy and ethics of pluralism. It was eye opening. If you start an ethical exploration where pluralism (respecting differences in values) is take for granted, and think it through, you do not necessarily end up with relativism (the claim that all values are equally good).
The ethics of pluralism apply to many other areas where people have differences, such as preferences for working environments. The connection is simple: if a group of people need to share a working environment, there will need to be some mechanism by which decisions are made. There is some budget of money and space that will need to be allocated.
Such a decision mechanism is (ultimately, whether it is obvious or not) connected to some underlying values. If the office manager decides based on "taking the pulse" of the office, you run the risk have an appointed person acting in a somewhat authoritarian way. How can you really guarantee the needs of the workers are actually being synthesized in a fair way? This is an incredibly challenging and complex area of philosophy and ethics.
If it is "one person, one vote", there may not be an underlying value system, since it appears to be purely a matter of politics. However, when such a system picks "one person, one vote", they may be missing out on better solutions, such as systems that work hard to find a consensus before simply taking a vote.
I could write hundreds of pages on this, because I've studied many others who have written probably 3 to 5 orders of magnitude more. It seems for the last twenty years, I've found myself disappointed that these topics seem mostly unexamined in most practical work situations. I've had to come to terms with the fact that many people are simply unaware, too busy with other things, or unaware of the importance of these mechanisms. Frankly, it is an uncomfortable place to be... when a big driver of my thinking is "let's make X situation better" but a relatively small number of organizations seem interested or able to make progress.
Instead, I see a parade of fads, usually connected with fairly pathetic PR campaigns (justifications to convince the workers) that such fad is desirable.
I've heard of this appealing design called "Eudaimonia Machine" that combines spaces for deep work and spaces for collaboration [1]. I would love to know if any companies have tried this out.
I remember going into an interview (written coding test too ha) and the cubicles had ceiling-high walls which were this dark plastic blue in color. The lighting was not right and it was dim. That was a weird place.
I worked in an open non-cubicle design too, closed back headphones ftw.
Thinking about my favorite libraries, this is what strikes me most: many people before and many people after will find inspiration in the same place. The people will change, the books will change, but the culture of respect for quiet (and thus concentration) will (hopefully) live on.
This idea of the place inspiring beyond ourselves is wonderful.
So, why not find ways of inspiring their employees beyond that particular job? ... What if more companies found ways to inspire people in very honest ways?
I don't particularly like corporate-speak on the walls or vague mission statements. But if there was a way to remind people of the following message, I think it would go a long way: "People will work here for varying lengths of time. While they are here, treat each other with respect. Let's share the best of ourselves. When these efforts align, our organization thrives, and we can keep working together in ways that we can feel good about."
The corollary, I think, would be "If we have to treat each other like sh*t in order for our company to be successful, what the heck are we doing here?" I somewhat prefer the negative phrasing.
Apologies for the idealism. Ultimately, messaging is only as good as its authenticity and follow up. If a company says e.g. "Come to Hooli to do your best work" and then offers ineffective working spaces, it is time to add an asterisk; e.g. "* under the constraints of having to work in a loud, unproductive, distracting environment."
It’s a bit unusual to most of us, but succession planning should really be practiced on an individual level.
You’re not the last person to hold your job in most cases. If you plan for it, burnout will be much less of an issue, and your job satisfaction should be equivalently enhanced.
So true. Thanks for sharing. I don’t think it’s idealistic, either. It’s simply taking a longer term, more broad perspective for the health of our communities and society, rather than simply the immediate quarter’s results.
It can’t be truly effective in the long run if you drive people insane on a long road to pernicion.
It is interesting to use a library as a model, but I would be amazed that you could get any particular company to understand and implement it. I could see teams having dedicated coworking areas that are extended from a large central open area. But, I could also predict that people would just carry their discussions into the open area, and constantly walk up and disturb the peace by asking "quick questions" anyway. Anyone asking others to "please be respectful" would probably get laughed at and ignored.
On the other hand, a coworking space might be able to pull off such a model, with a large open area, and then dedicated areas for team collaboration. You don't play by the rules: see you later.
I do think working physically next to others could be quite pleasant. But, given that in almost 23 years of work, I've never experienced this, I'll take remote work instead, since it at least gives me control over the mayhem. And maybe I'll ask if there's budget for some coworking space time. But given the current economy, I'm not holding my breath...
I'm curious about how we got to a place where we can assume that our colleagues will disrespect other colleagues and laugh at those asking for more respect.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but there is something quite horrid about a working culture where we think that might ever happen.
If you say "this big open space is like a library: no fixed desks, sit where you want; we expect quiet, there is a 'librarian' who is empowered to ask you to keep the noise down or leave; you do not bring food and drinks into this space other than water; you do not take calls or do meetings in this space", I think most people would get that.
But you would, perhaps, need the librarian to enforce the rules, because you're right, a decent %age of working age adults are utterly self-absorbed and will think the rules should not apply to them.
Perhaps part of the problem is in an open _public_ space like a library, the only person with authority is the librarian. In a company, that person is going to be a mid-level manager at best - what happens when a more senior manager decides they are going to break those rules?
I suspect for something like this to happen, the upper levels of management needs to understand the individual contributor better. I've worked now for some very large companies, and, most of them simply do not think about individual productivity at all. To them, this is simply "not their problem". Instead, it's something for the manager that directly interacts with the individual to deal with.
The problem is, you might have one team agree to this, and others not. But how many companies would let one team take control over their physical space? Very few places I know of would even let a lower-level manager relocate people together.
Problems of our working culture somehow seems tied to our hierarchies and specialties. We don't really give individual teams the budget to go find their own space; instead, it's all specialists who have very little interaction (and often zero insight) with individual contributors.
I wonder if companies should be more organized where teams were "mini-businesses". Instead of worrying about setting up one giant space, it was up to the team, with their own support staff (and budget) to figure everything like their working standards up. I suspect that would change culture quite a bit, mostly, because there wouldn't be this weird "this is the way we do things here because there's this massive team nobody interacts with" wall. Instead, if the team felt like they could do things better, they just do it.
My gut is telling me remote work will upend a bunch of things, because workers will feel more empowered.
One of our buildings has a space designated as "the library" with (as I recall) mostly standard study carrells that are pretty much as you describe. No fixed desks or reservations. You just find a space to read or work on your laptop. I'm not in that building very often but it's always seemed pretty quiet to me. Though to be honest when I've traveled there I often just worked out of the cafeteria because pre-pandemic I'd often run into people I knew.
ADDED: One practice which probably makes sense is to physically separate a quiet reading room from other areas. That way people aren't wandering by and having conversations.
One of my first jobs was IT for a University, and due to limited space, our team was housed in the University library. It was honestly fantastically handled by the Librarians as they addressed this by using the building space as a visual guide for the students and visitors.
The library had three floors and the rule was the higher the floor, the more you must absolutely uphold the "stay quiet" rule, and the design choices really spoke to this. The first floor (noise = okay) had open work areas; tables without barriers and multiple sockets, no walls between computers, vending machines, couches and other places situated for casual conversation/collaboration.
The second floor still had some open tables, but virtually every work space had some form of enclosure to it. There were also considerably more book shelves that guarded off each work space so it naturally lent itself to having barriers and privacy, and this led to quietness.
Third floor was the most densely packed book floor and the only working spaces were private enclosed ones, and there were far more of these alcoves that were basically a desk + socket for your electronics + lamp. Even the main lighting on the upper floors was different to give a calmer feel.
This worked extremely well as even first years and visitors just implicitly understood from the design that you could have a nice conversation on the first floor (shouting and screaming of course was still stopped, and no music without headphones (and even people who had headphones that leaked noise were held accountable pretty strictly)), but it seemed that the way the workspaces on the other floors were designed led to this quite nicely. The books of course helped asa natural barrier for the 2nd and 3rd floors to intercept other noises without incident.
My current work place, my team has an open floor plan due to a new temporary building and they're still feeling it out. Luckily the team has mostly understood that this is a new situation and they need to be respectful of the fact that they're in a shared space, but as the teams get more comfortable with the building, this is eroding a bit. I can't help but think that the same visual cueing would help a lot to give the impression of "this place is okay for an open conversation, this place is for people who need to focus."
> Perhaps part of the problem is in an open _public_ space like a library, the only person with authority is the librarian. In a company, that person is going to be a mid-level manager at best - what happens when a more senior manager decides they are going to break those rules?
The sad answer is that this sort of position needs a dedicated well-being manager or office manager to guide such items. It can't be a dual role with the primary work, it must be someone whose goal is to ensure the workplace is representing the needs of all employees, and then guiding people to where they can have such conversations and enforcing the zoning. My company has a well-being manager and she takes the job quite seriously in that she is always looking to get feedback on what people need while still enforcing the policies that are created to ensure a healthy work environment.
It is interesting how these apply to the kind of office I work in: the nurse's station of a hospital unit. Any attempt at a library ambiance is impossible with today's medical equipment, the amount of alarms active at any time is staggering.
Preferring written messages over voice calls is incentivized, but still needs work. You can page a physician, but almost always he will call back rather than respond in writing. Sometimes the physician will never enter the order into the electronic health record and so it needs to be entered by the nurse—that's an opportunity for error.
Introducing friction is a good idea. The best places for drawing up medications are ones with doors, it gives a rare moment of silence. Unfortunately there's a culture issue, people will leave those doors open and try to talk to people busy in there.
Newer-built units are much better spaces to work in, generally. They're larger and have these ideas in mind when built. It's rare when a tower can be completely demolished, however. New equipment fills older wings and staff have to squeeze past it.
There are people who like structure in their life. Working from home every day is not what they want. But, then, in the office one needs to work, hence some space that allows you to focus is a necessity.
For the record I do not like going to the office because of the above mentioned reasons. Furthermore, my home office has better equipment. My wife on the contrary loves going to the office although she could work from home.
> Please, tell me what is the point to go physically at work in an open space instead of doing remote work...
Exactly, there's no point going to work physically together unless you're building something physical.
Interaction with colleagues works extremely well using technology: text messages, emails, conference calls, one-to-one video calls, and even the "metaverse" if you're into cutting edge stuff.
Many of my co-workers with families have mentioned they prefer the office. They aren't fortunate enough to be able to afford a large house where everyone can have a private working space. Many houses have a single office space, perhaps a converted den, but how many have office space for two remote workers, plus the kids? How well does the home internet hold up when 4-5 people are all video conferencing?
For me it's about about a balance of different stimulation levels throughout the day. WFH if you live alone is near constant isolation. WFH if you live with others is near constant exposure to those others. Either of these single-speed lifestyles will wear me down.
When I worked in an open office and lived alone I would sometimes be overstimulated. At least eventually I'd get to go home and recover. A workstation in a library-rules space would have avoided the discomfort altogether though. Eat lunch with my coworkers, have high-bandwidth discussions in meeting rooms, chit-chat when coming up for air by the coffee/snacks/ping-pong, but also be able to retreat to my workstation and focus on code once for the bulk of the day.
Come to think of it, that's what college was like. I would study in the bowels of the library, take breaks in the peripheral food and social spaces where I'd often run into people I knew, and go back to my dorm room at night. That was the life.
I agree, as a dev, going to office is mostly to coordinate and socialize. I work much better from home. I worked in an open space, where the rule was "if you have more than 1min conversation, move out".
In the team I was, we often talked with each others, be it work related or not. So we ended up often working in others places together (one room for us 3-4 devs).
When sharing a small office my coworkers and I would talk a fair bit. Later I moved to a newly-remodeled space and I’ll give my coworkers credit: it was very quiet there, much like a library.
Which meant there was little reason to go into the office.
I think for collaboration, you want a nice team room (much like a meeting room) where everyone there is actually working together on the same project.
With remote work, open spaces from hell are (hopefully) a thing of the past, but key learnings on proper room culture are still valid after almost 200 years. How 400 people can work in deep focus in library but cannot do the same in company open space?
Maybe it's an overstatement but I personally feel like I'm in Panopticon when working in open offices. I do not experience the same feeling in co-working spaces and coffee shops though. It just feels more productive to work with strangers in the same room who don't care about what you're working on but are aware that you need to get stuff done. On the other end of the spectrum, work-from-home setups just feels very solitary and distractions are just more prevalent.
It isn't just you. I couldn't stand having my monitors facing other people when I had to work in an open space, even though I only ever had work on it.
> How 400 people can work in deep focus in library but cannot do the same in company open space?
They're different kinds of work. People usually (to this day) work alone in libraries. People in big open bullpen offices tend to work collaboratively.
Also, those solo library workers don't typically have bosses by whom to be seen collaborating. Or "collaborating."
Perhaps with libraries people think that they should be quiet there, while it is advertised as collaboration space for open spaces and people are encouraged to talk there?
Libraries are part of a larger "research ecosystem", so they can exclude all the loud and talkative bits of research because there are other places it can live like the hallways and cafeterias and text messages people use. Open offices are undifferentiated. There's nowhere to segregate disruptive activities to because there's nowhere else to go, except for maybe some small concessions to meeting rooms. That space can't even be a good space for everyone because it's constantly serving a hundred mutually conflicting uses rather than providing specialized purpose the way a reading room does.
The work is different. Most peole working in a library are reading a book or writing things down.
Not sure about yall, but I like to talk to myself as I'm coming up with and implementing a solution. Even if I'm whispering, I'm sure others can hear me and would find that distracting.
I really like the idea of the library as an open space and the most valuable idea I would gather is to have tons of noolks and crannies where desks are spaced far apart. This wouldn't work with people sitting side by side. Even the clacking of keyboards gets distracting after a while.
We don't need to refer to a librarian that way. Yeah, I know, Seinfeld did it. It isn't funny or interesting. It is a cliché. Let's try to choose our language so that our history and language can hold onto meanings that matter.
That person isn't "meek" usually, though. They are very clear that they have the power and you will obey them. They are very insistent, without ever having to get loud, and they will force you to follow the rules.
I don't have another word for that kind of person, but I agree that "nazi" should not be used that way.
Many years ago, I attended a university with a library reading room like those shown in the linked article. The high, arched ceilings made a huge difference. You could hear the sounds of people talking, coughing, rustling paper, etc. from throughout the room, but the sounds were dampened and dispersed as they echoed off the ceiling. As a result, they were rarely distracting, and I was able to get a lot of studying done.
Conversations were discouraged not only by the library rules. The acoustics also made it difficult to understand what even people sitting nearby said.
Not many libraries or offices built today could justify the expense of such architecture, though.
My local library could learn something from this layout. I'm afraid that most of us taxpayers can't afford a renowned British architect like this. My library is designed more like an office space, and comparing these with the article, I can see the flaws too.
My library has a hodgepodge of flat tables for 4, easy chairs, a few carrels, study rooms that can be reserved, a cafe with a dining area, etc. The computer labs are like sardine tins. This British library was designed thus because everybody went to the library to read books and write on paper, but since my library includes packets of vegetable seeds and tickets to museums, everybody goes to the library to do all sorts of disparate things, so the furniture must be versatile enough to accommodate everything, while discouraging sleeping.
Libraries formerly observed a strict code of silence, and this floorplan appears to cater to solitary readers, so a library, being filled with solitary patrons pursuing their own research goals, does not serve as an analog to a workspace with teams who collaborate and communicate actively.
The worst jobs I ever held were in call centers. I pity everyone who phones me from a call center because I can hear the cacophony behind them. It was truly impossible for me to concentrate or hear myself think. Working alone in a modern library is a little better than that.
I rarely have every experienced a library where it was quiet enough to do deep work. There is always that one (or more) person that ruins it. Talking loud, talking on their phone, even watching a show on their laptop out loud. This is in the US.
The worst I experienced was in Singapore. Kids running around like it was a playground. Or teenage couples using it as a place to date. The last one is a big wtf head scratcher to me.
In both my current and previous US city, downtown libraries function as de facto daytime homeless shelters. On the one hand this is good, as people in unfortunate circumstances can get Internet access, apply for jobs, and retain access to email. On the other hand some of those people browse porn, play music, and watch videos without headphones on the library computers. Others wander in off the street to have loud conversations with the front desk staff.
Where I live now, this feels like the library’s main purpose. Either as a cause or a consequence, library staff seem to see themselves as social workers first, activists second, and librarians third, as reflected in the library’s public services and calendar of events.
You get this in the UK too; libraries have become spaces for everyone to enjoy with the inevitable consequences.
Around ten years ago I didn't have the money for an office so would work a few hours each day in the 'quiet' section of our local library. I could sometimes go a whole 5 minutes without wanting to murder someone.
Honestly, because a quarter of the typical company is management whose main job is talking all day. In pathological situations, they spend more time talking up than down, to the point where my boss "sees" me for about 1.5 hours a week.
I have been thinking about this problem. Why not create a exclusive spaces/floor for quite workers? Where you cannot make noise at all. Like in a library. So anybody irrespective of teams can just go there and get things done. I think good balance is necessary. Sales teams/Marketing teams cannot be just silently sitting around. They are conversation-prone with their work nature. But could use the exclusive spaces when necessary.
But this again has to be enforced from the top. Not just for some employees. If the CEO or higher executives cannot uphold this, there is no point.
At a former company I used to work at, this is exactly how it worked. There was an area closed off in glass, literally called "the library". Though some of us called it the fishtank.
Rules were clear. It was for focussed and quiet work. Meetings and calls needed to be done outside.
I think once you allow eating at the tables and have everyone hammering their keyboards (as opposed to mostly reading) there won't be much of a difference to an open office anymore
Four hundred programmers, all in the same room, tapping away intermittently at their big, loud, mechanical keyboards. Swirling about the room as some people start cranking out the code at high speed, some pause to think and debug. You can hear when the whole team is in the groove and bringing that Lines Of Code metric up, but the sound of that one person thoughtfully, slowly, refactoring, and deleting reams of now-obsolete source vanishes in the rattle.
Nobody speaks. Nobody plays music. There is just the Clacking.
Having been in the reading room of a library that doesn't allow food and drink and a good half the people on keyboards, it really is much more subdued than an open office would be.
> I encourage all of you to visit your nearby library and spend some time there.
I go to the library pretty much every week. I would describe it as quieter than the open plan office I used to work in, but much louder than my home office. People frequently carry on full conversations on their phones in the library, and some people just sit and chat with their neighbors.
I don't think the stereotype of libraries as hushed temples of study is true anymore, except in some specific cases. In the 2000s, a lot of local library branches in my area pivoted into being community gathering places and general resource hubs, and the norms around making noise changed a bit. I've never heard a librarian shush anybody for talking.
People are not working collaboratively in open-plan offices.
"Recent research shows that such offices result in 73 per cent less face-to-face interaction, and a 67 per cent increase in email interaction." https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/325959
I believe it about open plan vs private offices, but this is a comparison between offices in general and libraries (which have effectively zero collaboration)
> libraries (which have effectively zero collaboration)
Have you never studied with other people together at a library? Most of my time spent in library during high school and university was spent working together on assignments or studying in groups for exams. It's not just me, whenever I go to my local libraries, they're always full of students studying (many studying in groups).
It's not unusual to have small rooms that groups can use to work together in a library. But in my experience with large libraries, the main reading rooms are pretty quiet and don't have groups speaking more than a token amount.
Offices exist for a variety of reasons: Supervision, access to information (paper files), equipment (phones, computers), status signaling, and moving information efficiently. The "collaboration" ruse seems like a recent invention. Managers collaborate just fine with private offices.
Collaboration is certainly valuable, but at the same time, I have a hunch that 90% of the time spent collaborating, is spent getting the stuff done that you agreed to do. Also, much of the communication involved in collaboration is not necessarily done best in front of an audience. These may be a couple of the reasons for reports that open-plan offices actually degrade collaboration.
A lot of the time I spent in libraries as a grad student was doing work that contributed to a collaboration. Likewise a lot of the coding that I do in isolation.
My tech company had a space called "the library" for "those times when you need to do deep focus work." There were several thousand engineers in the building. The library could seat maybe 15. No monitors, no outlets. Even when they come tantalizingly close to understanding, the idea is just so foreign to them, that most engineers should be focusing most of the time and that our elaborate monitor and keyboard setups are part of focus work.
Meanwhile out on the floor I have tried to (politely) call people out for e.g. having Zoom standup participants on full blast in the middle of the sea of desks. They shrugged and said, "it's an open office. You can wear headphones." This company prided itself on empowering engineers, providing them with the tools and resources to do their best work, and in some ways lived up to that. But the way we made it a totally individual burden to jam the noise or seek refuge elsewhere really undermined it.
Over 10 years later we bought another company and had their local staff over for a visit. Almost immediately a fairly loud person exclaimed "it's so quiet here!" (and not in a good way). Their office was separated into rooms of 4-5 people, so they were used to plenty of banter. Interestingly the quiet ones complained about the loud ones (but not the other way around).
We ended up with a somewhat hybrid model - we took on more space and made more open-plan areas, and small-team offices.
I'm a coder, do I like the solitude to focus. Others need more interaction. I think there's a danger in trying to propogate a one-approach-for-everyone. Different people have different needs. Creating a mix of spaces allows for mentorship at the beginning and an eventual migration to either a solitary space, or co-work space, depending on personality. This approach though never seems to get any press, it's always about the tyranny of open plan, or the soulessness of everyone being locked away in cells. (on HN its always the tyranny of Open plan :)